FOLLOWING Prime Minister’s Questions session in Parliament on Wednesday left wing Labour MP Richard Burgon went on social media warning that Keir Starmer will face the ‘mother of all rebellions’ unless the Labour government backtracks over the slashing of benefits.
Burgon said on X that Starmer had been unable to answer the simple question about why a disabled person ‘who needs help to eat, wash and manage toilet needs could no longer get personal independence payments under his proposals’ and warned: ‘The government must drop this cruel proposal, or it’ll face the mother of all rebellions.’ Starmer had replied to the question Burgon was referring to, put to him by SNP MP Colum Eastwood, insisting that the current benefits system is ‘morally and economically indefensible’.
The ‘moral’ decisions that Starmer and the Labour government are taking in regard to freezing personal independence payments (PIP) and tightening eligibility criteria will strip away support from an estimated four million chronically sick and disabled people.
According to a Resolution Foundation report, the cuts will mean up to 1.2 million people losing PIP payments of between £4,200 and £6,300.
There is no ‘morality’ behind Starmer’s drive to force the sick and disabled into abject poverty and starvation levels of existence. There is, however, the overwhelming requirement of this Labour government to ‘save’ £5 billion to try and hold back the massive national debt of over £3 trillion which is increasing at a rate of £5,170 a second!
To ‘save’ £5 billion, the Starmer-led Labour government has declared to the capitalist ruling class, that Labour is prepared to drive the most vulnerable people in Britain into the gutter through super austerity cuts, that even past Tory governments were unable to carry through.
The ‘mother of all rebellions’ in the Labour Party has already begun with splits between MPs and Labour councillors rapidly emerging this week.
Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph newspaper revealed that Starmer is facing a mass resignation of Labour councillors over the savage cuts to PIP benefits.
The growing rebellion in the ranks of Labour on Tuesday, with the resignation of the leader of Dudley Labour Group, councillor Pete Lowe, who said the cuts to PIP were ‘the final straw’ after previous decisions to end pensioners’ winter fuel payments.
Lowe had been a Labour Party member for 41 years.
In his question to Starmer on Wednesday, Eastwood asked ‘what’s the point of Labour?’ a question that is increasingly splitting the Labour Party apart, with millions of workers and youth asking exactly the same question.
Former Tory Chancellor Osborne, the driving force behind the Tories vicious austerity war to rescue British capitalism from bankruptcy, following the global financial crash, said last week: ‘Starmer is sounding pretty Conservative at the moment,’ and lamented that previous Tory governments ‘took their eye off the ball’ when it came to smashing up the benefit system.
With Starmer picking up the ball of austerity, and with the Labour Party splitting apart, and on the verge of a major revolt, some form of coalition between the right wing of the Labour Party and the Tories to ‘save the nation’, that is save the profits of the bankers and bosses, by driving the working class back to conditions of the 19th century, is an immediate prospect.
Starmer also got support from TUC general secretary Paul Nowak. He welcomed ‘reform’ of the benefit system to drive the unemployed and disabled back to work, while adding the pathetic call for Starmer to ‘reconsider the scale of proposed cuts’ to the disabled.
While Labour MPs are threatening civil war over benefits, and Labour councillors are resigning across the country, all Nowak can do is beg Starmer not to be too harsh.
The time has now arrived for the working class to use its massive power to force the calling of an emergency TUC congress to sack leaders who are tied to this Labour government, and replace them with a leadership prepared to call an immediate general strike to defend the gains of the welfare state by kicking out this Labour government and bringing in a workers government.
A workers government will nationalise the banks and major industries, placing them under the ownership and management of the workers state to build a socialist planned economy whose purpose will be to introduce socialism
